Absolutely. Email marketing is alive and well, and for those fortunate to have not discounted it, it is a cash cow, cable of generating serious money at virtually no cost. In other words, the one reason you should still be paying attention to email marketing is simply because it works.

Email is one of the great levelers in today's society. It does not matter if you want to talk to the President of the United States, Bill Gates or my Grandmother, they can all be reached on email. From silicon valley entrepreneurs to elderly ladies in Pasadena, they all have email. In fact, it is the rarity anymore to find someone that does not have an email address, and virtually unheard of in the coveted under 40 marketing demographic. There is little doubt that it is the most used long-distance communication method on the planet.

And for all that, marketing by email has been largely ignored in recent years. Passed over in favor of more glitzzy, more trendy marketing methods, lonely email marketing just keeps doing its thing, pumping out quantities of cash for those who have not abandoned it.

First, though, let me clear up a misconception or two. By email marketing, I do not mean SPAM. In fact, i mean the opposite of SPAM. Rather than send email about things they don't want to people who do not want to be emailed, we will talk about sending email to people who asked to get email from us. This is called opt-in email, and properly used, it is extremely powerful. Savvy marketers have seen the value in building a list of opt-in subscribers who have raised their hand and said "market to me".

Imagine how much easier your life as a marketer would be if instead of marketing to the Internet at large you had a list of 5000 people who knew you, liked you and wanted to buy what you sell. Just to make the deal even sweeter, imagine it cost you virtually nothing to market to these people. Impossible, you say? Not at all. That is the life of an email marketer.

If you did nothing more but put a form on your web site to collect the addresses of those who came by and asked to be on your mailing list, you would be ahead of the game. You see, email marketing is push based marketing, as opposed to more trendy pull based options. With pull marketing, you post content on a blog, you build a widget, whatever and hope people come by and see it and talk about it. With email, you are sending them the marketing message, when you want them to see it, in a format you control.

One large advantage to email marketing, in addition to the low cost of entry, is how easy it is to integrate into whatever marketing you are already doing. For example, if you are a blogger, it has been estimated that less than 10% of the population uses RSS to subscribe to blogs (obviously, this will vary from blog to blog, with high tech blogs obviously skewing much higher). However, virtually every reader of your blog has an email account. If you use a service such as Feed-Blitz (www.feedblitz.com), you can automatically send your subscribers an email whenever you update your blog.

Another way to do it would be to send your regular customers an email newsletter, letting them know about upcoming sales or events in your business. Once quite expensive to pull off, there are now a variety of options to do it, with several high quality free tools (such as Zookoda - www.zookoda.com) and even the paid options such as Aweber (www.aweber.com) having came down in price dramatically.

One problem many of us have these days is not a lack of information, but rather too much information. One large advantage to email is that we as marketers have control over when the message arrives. If you are the owner of a furniture store and you are having a water-bed sale this weekend, it would be good to put it up on your web site at the beginning of the week, but even if I see it, it is doubtful I will write in my calendar that Bob's Furniture Warehouse is having a water-bed sale this weekend. But, if you email me the first day of the sale, I may stop by on my way home from work.

Those email marketers who take this stuff seriously realize that they can use email marketing as a cash flow device. For example, if you have a list of 10,000 people who raised their hand and said, I want to receive information on a regular basis about ipods, you could email them twice a month, with some informative information about ipods, such as the latest releases, the newest models, etc. and in each email, include this weeks special offer, such as an ipod case that "normally" costs $10, but they can get it today for $5 (it cost you $1 in quantity). A certain number of those people will buy it. Boom, cash flow surge! After 6 months of sending emails with special offers included, you will see trends and "know" that sending that email will bring in X number of orders. You know have a regular source of cash flow that costs you nothing but the time to maintain it.

These have only been a few examples, but I think you can see the possibilities that are still available with email marketing. Whether you want to communicate with your customers, build your profile or generate serious sales, there is someone using email marketing to do it.

Whatever your business, there is no doubt that adding email marketing to your marketing mix can help you achieve your business goals faster. Savvy marketers have been doing it for years. The question is, will you get on the bus, or are you going to be left at the station?

Comments (1)

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written by Bid Links Directory , October 31, 2007

I don't think so but it has new name email campaining it is same but not spamed emails would get emails.

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